Cognitive Science

The latest breakthroughs, innovations, and cool happenings at the cutting edge of the world of cognitive science. Updated daily.

Neural and Behavioral Effects of an Adaptive Online Verbal Working Memory Training in Healthy Middle-Aged Adults

Neural correlates of working memory (WM) training remain a matter of debate, especially in older adults. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) together with an n-back task to measure brain plasticity in healthy middle-aged adults following an 8-week adaptive online verbal WM training. Participants performed 32 sessions of this training on their personal computers. […]

Published on November 2, 2019

Track It to Crack It: Dissecting Processing Stages with Finger Tracking

A central goal in cognitive science is to parse the series of processing stages underlying a cognitive task. A powerful yet simple behavioral method that can resolve this problem is finger trajectory tracking: by continuously tracking the finger position and speed as a participant chooses a response, and by analyzing which stimulus features affect the […]

Published on November 1, 2019

Overinformative Speakers Are Cooperative: Revisiting the Gricean Maxim of Quantity

Abstract A pragmatic account of referential communication is developed which presents an alternative to traditional Gricean accounts by focusing on cooperativeness and efficiency, rather than informativity. The results of four languageā€production experiments support the view that speakers can be cooperative when producing redundant adjectives, doing so more often when color modification could facilitate the listener’s […]

Published on October 31, 2019